Radio Free Vermont Read online

  ALSO BY BILL McKIBBEN

  The End of Nature

  The Age of Missing Information

  Hope, Human and Wild

  Maybe One

  Hundred Dollar Holiday

  Long Distance

  Enough

  Wandering Home

  The Comforting Whirlwind

  Deep Economy

  Fight Global Warming Now

  The Bill McKibben Reader

  American Earth

  Eaarth

  The Global Warming Reader

  Oil and Honey

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by William McKibben

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McKibben, Bill, author.

  Title: Radio Free Vermont : a fable of resistance / Bill McKibben.

  Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017009744 (print) | LCCN 2017014871 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735219878 (EPub) | ISBN 9780735219861 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Government, Resistance to—Fiction. | Secession—Vermont—Fiction. | Counterculture—Fiction. | Vermont—Fiction. | Political fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Humorous. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Political. | GSAFD: Humorous fiction. | Satire.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C5588 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.C5588 R33 2017 (print) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009744

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Spunky Knowsalot

  Contents

  Also by Bill McKibben

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  1

  The morning crowd at the Bennington Starbucks moved through the time-honored rituals with rote familiarity: ordering their caffeine and caramel in pidgin Italian, waiting like schoolkids for their names to be called, and then either exiting into the faintly cool January air or sinking childlike into an oversized, overplushed armchair for a hit of the Web. The stereo played, over and over, the same nine songs by aging—aged, actually—guitar hero Peter Frampton, now appropriately acoustic.

  Then, right in the middle of some melancholy chord, a voice crackled over the sound system, a voice that some people in the coffee shop immediately recognized. “Greetings, Green Mountain Starbuckers,” said Vern Barclay in his deep radio baritone with just a hint of his Franklin County upbringing. “This is a special message going out just to those of you in the nineteen Vermont shops. The other 34,513 Starbucks scattered across the planet Earth and aboard our lazily orbiting space station will continue to listen to Mr. Frampton mark the launch of his new album on Starbucks’ label. I know that all of us join in thanking the coffee giant for taking the musical icons of our various youths and encouraging them to noodle acoustically in the background, and it is a great pleasure to know that no matter which shop you visit, the soundtrack will be the same—it’s almost as reassuring as the muffled bu-dump bu-dump of the womb. But today, your friends here at Radio Free Vermont, ‘underground, underpowered, and underfoot,’ wanted to take this opportunity to patch into the streaming Starbucks signal and remind you that we still have coffee shops in this state actually owned by Vermonters. Coffee shops where the money in the till doesn’t disappear back to Seattle, where the cream in the MochaSexy CappaMolto comes from the cow down the road, and where the music on the stereo might actually come from your neighbors. You can find a list at RadioFreeVermont.org, if the authorities haven’t managed to shut it down today, and don’t bother telling them Vern sent you—they’ll know. Remember: small is kind of nice. And now—if perhaps your barista will be so kind as to turn up the volume a notch or two—we leave you with a little Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, straight out of Waitsfield.”

  As it happened, the manager was actually up on a stool trying to turn the speakers off. But not before Grace Potter’s voice on the chorus of “Ah, Mary” cut through the morning air:

  Ah, Mary

  She’ll bake you cookies then she’ll burn your town

  Ah, Mary

  Ashes, ashes but she won’t fall down

  Meanwhile, about sixty miles north, a beer truck lumbered slowly off the Crown Point Bridge and began the drive up Route 22 toward Burlington. It hadn’t gone a mile before the driver came to an orange detour sign in the middle of the road, and turned left on a dirt farm road. He drove about a mile more, past cows staring impassively at the sides of his truck with its pictures of two young women in bikinis, reclining in a hot tub and hoovering Coors Light long necks with an ardor that suggested deep and full-bodied pleasure. Around a bend in the road, the truck driver found another detour sign, and followed it for two miles, till yet another sign guided him down a dirt road next to a creek lined with willows, a creek still flowing in the mild January chill. After about a mile of that—with the road turning into rut—he came upon a lady in a balaclava holding a Stop sign. The driver braked, and as he did two young men—also in balaclavas—appeared, one on either side of the truck. Each had a tire pressure gauge, and within seconds air was hissing out of the front tires and the truck slumped slightly forward.

  “Apologies,” said the lady in the balaclava. “This will take a little while, I’m afraid. If you wanted to walk to the nearest house and call the police that’s fine, but it’s about four miles. Or you could wait a little while, and then we’ll fill your tires again. Anyway we’ve made you a picnic.” She put a paper sack on the seat beside him and started lifting things out. “BLT, with bacon from Vermont Smoke and Cure. A whole pint of Strafford Creamery maple walnut ice cream. And here’s something special: a bottle of the new Long Trail Coffee Stout in Bridgewater Corners. The coffee doesn’t come from Vermont, but it is roasted her
e—you can only have one, because we’re serious about DUI in this state, but I think you’ll find it filling. And we’ve got a gift pack of beers from fifty-one of Vermont’s brewers to send home with you! Did you know we had more breweries per capita than any place on earth? I have no idea why they think we need Coors too.” While she talked—the driver just gaped—the two young men were busy hauling down cartons of beer. They opened each, quickly twisted the caps, and then turned the whole box upside down to drain. When the bottles were empty, they loaded the cartons into the back of two pickups.

  The driver watched from his rearview mirror, and after about half an hour he finally spoke:

  “Hey, lady. This is going to take forever—I’ve got twelve hundred cartons in the truck. Why don’t you just toss them over the side and let me go?”

  The woman looked up at him from above a draining carton of beer. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “This is Vermont. We recycle.”

  Three hours later they were done. The balaclava-clad men pumped up his tires with a 12-volt air compressor and then disappeared into the small clayplain forest at the edge of the farm driveway; the woman thanked the driver and then disappeared herself. He couldn’t think what else to do, so he started his truck and headed back toward the bridge and his home in New York, forty-eight hundred bottles of Coors Light-er but with an impressive stack of cases of Vermont microbrew. The Holsteins stared at him with the same unimpressed gaze, even though the ladies on the side of the truck now sported large talk balloons above their heads.

  “My breasts are suspiciously large,” one was saying to the other.

  “As are mine, and this beer tastes quite watery,” replied her tubmate.

  The seventh grade of Harwood Union High School hunched over their laptops, waiting for the next problem set. In the morning, like every other seventh grade in the state and indeed the nation, they’d finished three modules of science questions in the monthly EYE (Every Youth Enhanced) tests mandated by the federal Department of Education. Now they were waiting for the beep that would signal the start of the American history section. A Distance Learning Specialist, highly trained both to reboot connections and block students from accessing anything interesting on the Internet, watched from his desk in the front of the room.

  The digital tone rang, and the screens all set to the first question:

  THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS COMPOSED OF THREE BRANCHES:

  The legislative, the executive, and the President

  The executive, the judicial, and the Supreme Court

  The legislative, the Congress, and the Bill of Rights

  The legislative, the judicial, and the executive

  Before even the swiftest could toggle the answer, though, the screens went blank and then were instantly replaced with a new set of questions, blinking in the same font:

  GREETINGS, YOUNG VERMONTERS. THIS DAY, THE 21ST OF JANUARY, 2018, IS THE BIRTHDAY OF

  Ethan Allen, hero of Ticonderoga and captain of the Green Mountain Boys

  Gov. Leslie Bruce, hero of nothing

  Ben

  Jerry

  WHEN ETHAN ALLEN CAPTURED THE CANNON AT TICONDEROGA FROM THE BRITISH, HE SAID WHAT TO THE COMMANDER OF THE IMPERIAL FORCES:

  That he came “in the name of the Great God Jehovah and the Continental Congress”

  “Come out here, you damned old rat.”

  “Come out of there, you sons of British whores, or I’ll smoke you out.”

  All of the above

  ETHAN ALLEN, WHILE VERMONT WAS STILL AN INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC, WROTE A BOOK ATTACKING THE PURITAN ORTHODOXY OF THE DAY. IN IT HE SAID THAT THOSE WHO BELIEVED THAT CHRISTIANS WERE “THE FAVORITES OF HEAVEN EXCLUSIVELY” WERE “NARROW AND BIGOTED.” WHEN ETHAN ALLEN DIED, THEREFORE, PROMINENT AMERICANS SAID OF HIM:

  “Ethan Allen of Vermont died and went to hell this day.”

  “He was an awful infidel, one of ye wickedest men ye ever walked this guilty globe. I stopped and looked at his grave with a pious horror.”

  “The mortal remains of Ethan Allen, fighter, writer, statesman, and philosopher, lie in this cemetery. His spirit is in Vermont now.”

  All of the above

  SINCE TODAY IS ETHAN ALLEN’S BIRTHDAY (REMEMBER—READ CAREFULLY TO ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS), YOUR FRIENDS AT RADIOFREEVERMONT.ORG ARE PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT THE REST OF TODAY’S TESTING HAS BEEN CANCELED. ON YOUR WAY OUT THE DOOR, PLEASE THANK THE DISTANCE LEARNING SPECIALIST FOR HIS OR HER HARD WORK ON BEHALF OF YOUR EDUCATION. SHOULD HE OR SHE PROTEST YOUR DEPARTURE, PLEASE QUOTE MR. ALLEN: “EVER SINCE I ARRIVED TO A STATE OF MANHOOD, I HAVE FELT A SINCERE PASSION FOR LIBERTY.”

  2

  “Explain to me again why they can’t trace our location?” Vern Barclay asked. A thin and graying man, he sat in a small, book-crammed study, slightly slouched over the microphone on the rolltop desk before him.

  The question was addressed to a young man, on his knees beneath the desk, who was disconnecting a pair of alligator clips from a telephone jack.

  “Well, because wireless?” said Perry Alterson, rapidly coiling the short length of cable and stowing it in a yellow toolbox. As Alterson rose, his dreadlocks drooped down toward his shoulders. He was lanky—skinny, really—and pale; Aretha Franklin’s profile peered from his T-shirt.

  “When the Internet began,” Perry continued, “people had dial-up? Which for a year or two seemed very fast and then it seemed very slow? So we got cable, DSL, satellite—‘broadband.’ By now, even in Vermont there’s nothing but high-speed?”

  “Remind me again when you got out of high school,” said Vern. “Actually, don’t remind me.”

  “I didn’t completely get out?” said Perry. “I mean, I stopped going a couple of years ago, but I’m not—I didn’t have that much in common with my classmates?”

  “That seems possible,” said Vern. “Anyway—the Internet.”

  “So, the whole system is insanely fast now. That’s why you can download a two-hour movie in four seconds? But all the old architecture is still underneath. They didn’t replace it, they just built over it. As long as you’ve got the old hardware, you can still go right through a phone jack and into the ’net. It’s . . . retro? And that’s what garage sales are for.” He held up an ancient rectangular modem, green light blinking slowly, then reached down to disconnect it from the wall and coiled the wire before adding it to the toolbox.

  “The thing is,” Perry continued, “the authorities spend all their time trying to out-hack the latest hackers? They’ve got gear that can follow every pulse of light down a fiber-optic cable in a nanosecond? That’s why our website is down more often than it’s up. It takes every trick I can think of to keep Radio Free Vermont from disappearing altogether. It’s why you have to do podcasts, nothing live: they’d be through our door in half an hour? But when it’s like this morning, and all we need to do is appear for a few minutes out of nowhere and then vanish, then the old copper wires are just fine. And none of their tracing equipment even notices—it’s tuned for fast, not slow?”

  “It’s like they’ve blockaded the airport and we’re at the train station,” said Vern, as much to himself as to Perry. “Did you know that a hundred years ago you could get to almost every town in Vermont on the train? You ever notice how even little hamlets come with a depot down by the common? Most of them are art galleries now, but a depot implies a train, does it not? A train pulling in every few hours and heading up the valleys, across the mountains, down to New York, up to Montreal. A civilized thing, a train.”

  “Anyway,” said Perry. “Don’t ask me to send video across the copper? Pause, pause, buffer, buffer—that’s why they switched, really. If you want to have TV on a computer, the phone lines won’t do.”

  “No need for pictures,” said Vern. “We’re quite old school.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Perry, a little hesitantly. “The Grace Potter song? It
rocked? But do you think maybe, since we’re doing a radio station, we could play something that . . . I don’t know.”

  “What are you thinking of?” Vern asked.

  “Well,” said Perry, looking down at his shirt. “Aretha. Or Etta James. Or Isaac Hayes. Or LaVern Baker. Or Fontella Bass. Or Nina Simone. Or Curtis Mayfield—did you know Superfly was number seventy-two on the Rolling Stone list of the five hundred greatest albums? Or—”

  “I don’t think any of them are from Vermont,” said Vern.

  “Almost no soul singers are from Vermont,” said Perry. “Except Kat Wright and the Indomitable Soul Band. But how are we going to have a liberation struggle if all our supporters are listening to classical music on the public radio? I mean, we’re supposed to be running a revolution here, not a pledge drive?”

  “But we’re supposed to be about Vermont,” Vern said. “Vermont milk, Vermont beer, Vermont music.”

  “Milk and beer are products—they’re supposed to be fresh? Music is an idea—it travels? And some of it lasts because it’s . . . good.” Perry, usually deferential, was becoming animated in a fashion Vern had never seen in their short time together. “I mean, are we only going to read books that get written in Vermont? Are we only going to look at paintings of fall colors? Curtis Mayfield wrote a song, ‘Choice of Colors,’ number five on the R&B chart. We need a choice of colors.”

  “Okay, next time,” said Vern, but Perry had already taken the headphones from around his neck, placed them squarely over his ears, and walked out of the room, toolbox in hand.

  Vern stared out the window, at a muddy paddock and beyond it the kind of second-growth hardwood forest he loved best. Normally, off the mike, he would have been out the door and into the woods—he’d spent the better part of his life, in all senses of the phrase, wandering the backcountry of Vermont.

  But not today. For one thing, he was a wanted man. This was a secluded farmhouse at the end of a long dirt road and there wasn’t much chance he’d run into anyone else, especially since Syl was away with the beer-truck caper and her classes were therefore canceled for the day. Still, his picture (and not a very flattering one, in his opinion) was up on every computer screen in the state, and there was no sense taking chances.